We’ll celebrate healthcare for everybody and talk a little about the tea party-animals, which will fit right in with our guest…

What makes us human? Was it walking? Making and using tools? Planning for the hunt? Or, was it…..drum roll… cooking??

Yes, cooking – heating and cooking food – gave us a better diet, created social bonding, all sorts of things.

In Catching Fire, a reviewer writes:

“Wrangham says the adoption of cooking had profound impacts on human families and relationships, making hearth and home central to humanity and driving humans into paired mating and perhaps even traditional male-female household roles.
He writes that the advent of cooking permitted a new distribution of labor between men and women: Men entered into relationships to have someone to cook for them, freeing them up for socializing and other pursuits and bolstering their social standing. Women benefited from men’s protection, safeguarding their food from thieves. Homo sapiens remains the only species in which theft of food is uncommon even when it would be easy.”

“Whatever their virtues, men are more violent than women. Why do men kill, rape, and wage war, and what can we do about it? Drawing on the latest discoveries about human evolution and about our closest living relatives, the great apes, Demonic Males offers some startling new answers. Dramatic, vivid, and firmly grounded in meticulous research, this book will change the way you see the world. As the San Francisco Chronicle said, it “dares to dig for the roots of a contentious and complicated subject that makes up much of our daily news.”"

Guns – Is there a mandate in the Constitution for proper training on how to use guns safely? Will the NRA be offering this free of charge to all citizens? Who owns the bullets after they leave the gun? (the shooter obviously, but…)

Banning the burka – should people be legally required to show their faces? Any other body parts? Where do you draw the line?

I think President Obama is earnest, smart, and much more centrist than his tea party caricature suggests. He has never been given a fair chance to succeed by those who openly crow about their desire to see him fail (while somehow congratulating one another on their relative patriotism). I know he was born in America, isn’t a socialist, and doesn’t worship in a mosque. I get that he inherited a minefield. Still, the level of federal spending concerns me. And he never closed the deal with me that health insurance is a right, not a privilege. But I’m not folding the tent on him. Not now. Not with the nation fighting two wars while its economy still teeters on the brink of collapse.

Love your current coverage? Want to throw out the bills and just start from scratch?? Check this out…

Even those families that enjoy generous insurance now are likely to see the cost of those benefits escalate. The typical price of family coverage now runs about $13,000 a year, but premiums are expected to nearly double, to $24,000, by 2020, according to the Commonwealth Fund. That equals nearly a quarter of the median family income today.

While some employers will continue to contribute the lion’s share of those premiums, there will be less money for employees in the form of raises or bonuses.